That which again unsealed the lyric fountains was Romanticism. Whatever else this much discussed but ill defined word involves--sympathy with the middle ages, new perception of the world of nature, interest in the foreign and the unusual--it certainly suggests a radically new estimate of the importance and of the authority of the individual. It was to the profit of the individual that the old social and political forms had been broken up and melted in the Revolution. It could seem for a moment as if, with the proclamation of the freedom and independence of the individual, all the barriers were down that hemmed in his free motion, as if there were no limits to his self-assertion. His separate personal life got a new amplitude, its possibilities expanded infinitely, and its interest was vastly increased. The whole new world of ideas and impulses urged the individual to pursue and to express his own personal experience of the world. CHATEAUBRIAND made the great revelation of the change that had taken place, and in spite of the fact that his instrument is prose, the lyric quality of many a passage of René was as unmistakable as it was new. But the lyric impulse could not at once shake off literary tradition. It needed to learn a new language, one more direct and personal, one less stiff with the starch of propriety and elegance. The more spontaneous and genuine it became, the closer it approached this language. DELAVIGNE won great applause by his _Messéniennes_ (1815-19), but the lyric impulse was not strong enough in him to make him independent of the traditional rhetoric. MME. DESBORDES-VALMORE, less influenced by literary training and more mastered by the emotion that prompted her, found the real lyric note. But it was especially LAMARTINE whose poetic utterance was most spontaneous and who recovered for France the gift of lyric expression. His _Méditations poétiques_ (1820) were greeted with extraordinary enthusiasm and marked the dawn of a new era in French poetry.